Since the dawn of mankind, countless hours have been dedicated to trying to figure out what happens to us when we die. 

Christians broadly believe that there is a heaven and hell, and that those deemed to have lived virtuous enough lives will end up living in eternity with God, while those who lived in sin and vice will spend their immortal lives being tortured by the Devil. 

Jews, meanwhile, broadly see hell not as a place of eternal damnation, but as a sort of washing machine that cleanses souls of their evil before they can be sent to Gan Eden to live in peace forever more. 

And Buddhists see death as part of a near-perpetual cycle known as Saṃsāra. 

This process only ends if Nirvana, or liberation, is achieved through the shedding of material desire. 

But the truth is that few of us truly know what happens beyond the veil. 

For most, death is a one-way street whose mysteries can only be solved by those who can never return. 

However, some fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, few have managed to come back after dipping their toes in the River Styx. 

Those who have come back have reported wildly different visions of what they see after death, from endless voids to eternal light.

Scientists say that a combination of oxygen deprivation, chemical surges, and neurological shutdowns can trigger hallucinations that make these near-death experiences feel intensely real. 

But for those who have bore witness to these experiences, they are more than mere tricks of the brain – they’re proof of a larger truth.

Bodybuilder who took ‘toxic’ supplement sees the ‘movie’ of his own resuscitation 

Vincent Tolman (pictured) fell unconscious in January 2003 after taking a dodgy workout supplement

Tolman explained how he was transported to a ‘very comfortable movie chair’ and that he was watching his death unfold from the comfort of what he believed was a theatre

He claimed to have seen paramedics place his body in a bag, adding that he could hear one of them thinking to himself

A former bodybuilder who was dead for up to 45 minutes after taking a ‘toxic’ supplement he bought with a friend online claimed to have seen heaven. 

Vincent Tolman fell unconscious in January 2003 after taking the dodgy chemical, and said he could see himself lying on the ground. 

Recounting his near-death experience, he said: ‘They think I was dead for at least 30 to 45 minutes before they found me, but I was cold, like cold to the touch.

‘Back in the day, I was an amateur bodybuilder, I was taking a fairly new supplement. Turns out, the supplement was toxic, and I ended up aspirating in a public bathroom.  

‘So I had passed out and started to vomit, and I aspirate on that vomit and and I ended up dying right there on the bathroom floor.’

Tolman explained how he felt he was suddenly transported to a ‘very comfortable movie chair’ and that he was watching his death unfold from the comfort of what he believed was a theatre.

He continued: ‘The movie was the scene of this body on the ground, and I was looking at everything from above. But what’s weird is it didn’t feel like it was me at all – even though I was sitting there looking at my own dead body, I couldn’t recognise it.

‘It would almost be like going to a movie, like a real movie, and seeing someone dressed like you and looking like you on the movie, but you’re like, that’s not me, because he’s over here watching the movie – that’s what it felt like.

‘So I had no idea that what I was watching was my own death.’ 

He then claimed to have seen paramedics place his body in a bag, adding that he could hear one of them thinking to himself. 

‘I actually saw light, a real light, start glowing from inside this rookie medic,’ he shared.

‘And it felt as if like someone put a light bulb inside his shirt, like light was actually coming out from his heart space and out of nowhere, this really strong voice says, this one’s not dead’.

The medic broke protocol and unzipped the body bag, before checking for signs of life. 

Though he felt no pulse, he felt a spark near Tolman’s upper thigh and set about resuscitating him, thankfully bringing him back to life. 

Author transported to a ‘completely different dimension’ after gym workout goes wrong 

Philip Hasheider (pictured) collapsed while working out in 2015 

Philip said of his experience: ‘It was like being in a huge open amphitheatre, realising that there is no sky, there is no stars, there is no moon, there is no galaxies’

What started off as a bog-standard morning workout quickly devolved into a terrifying battle for the life of farmer-turned-author Philip Hasheider. 

As he began a set of bicep curls in his gym in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 2015 he felt his arm tingling. 

And just seconds later, he collapsed. Emergency services were called, as his heart had stopped and his skin began turning blue owing to a lack of oxygen. 

Doctors said he had died for six minutes.  

He told Coming Home, a YouTube channel dedicated to telling stories of those who have nearly died that he felt he had been transported outside our universe. 

Philip said: ‘The next moment, I find myself in a completely different dimension. It was like being in a huge open amphitheatre, realising that there is no sky, there is no stars, there is no moon, there is no galaxies’.

He said he saw a huge golden orb that filled his entire vision: ‘I instantly knew that this was the nest of the source of all creation. 

‘This is where everything is created and this is where everything is created anywhere. Each of us carries the DNA of that creator energy and we take that with us wherever we go’.

All the while, the author said, he was entirely unaware of the efforts being made to save his life: ‘There were a dozen EMTs and hospital staff trying frantically to restart my heart. 

A paramedic who worked to save his life said: ‘Philip was clinically dead. His heart had stopped. He wasn’t breathing on his own’. 

‘Had I known that, I couldn’t even call them to tell them “don’t bother, this is great”‘, Philip quipped.

When he regained consciousness, he said he didn’t realise how close to death he had been: ‘A door had been opened up to me and I had stepped through it. I still did not realise that my body was back on the floor. I didn’t have any awareness that I had died’.  

He was later told by paramedics that he’d had just a 5% chance of survival.

He revealed that he struggled to come to terms with why he had come back from the brink: ‘I thought, “Why do I want to stick around here?” 

‘And it’s not because I don’t love my wife, it’s not because I don’t love my family, it’s just because everything was so far beyond great where I was,’ he admitted. 

A dream he had some time later revealed he had been sent back as a ‘conduit of hope’: ‘The hope of which I speak has to do with not being afraid of what comes next. 

‘This life that we understand is not the end. The internal spirit is what continues on. That essence of us that goes on is part of the God creation – and that doesn’t get destroyed’.

Paramedic’s 11 minutes in ‘perfect inky blackness’ after woodworking accident

Adam Tapp (pictured) said he witnessed a ‘perfect inky blackness’

Adam Tapp, a Canadian paramedic, found himself in an unusual position in February 2018. 

His day job requires him to provide first aid to the sick and needy. But, for once, he was the one needing urgent care. 

While working on a woodshop project, his hand was pieced by a tool known as a Lichtenberg device. 

These send a high-powered electrical current through materials to etch nerve-like lines into products. 

But when they cut through human flesh, they can be incredible dangerous, sending up to 2,000 volts into the human body. 

A friend who was with Adam disconnected the device and called for his wife, who is a cardiac nurse. 

Adam said: ‘I was moving the electrodes one-by-one and it just arcs into my hands. And it was just this snap from reality. And it was almost overwhelming. 

‘It was like this intense, intense level of absolute pain, like every single cell in my body was being pulled into pieces’.

He said he found himself ‘falling’ before he saw himself as a single point of awareness in a dark, endless void. 

Though most people would be terrified by the prospect of endless eternity, Adam felt nothing more that tranquillity.

He said: ‘It was this perfect inky blackness. I wasn’t Adam. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t anything. I was just perfect, like absolute contentment. Then I felt sort of this frequency started washing over me, and it was, it was like this fractal patterns. 

‘And it was like gasoline on water, this rainbow effect that was iridescent to some extent and it was just this juxtaposition of thoughts and feelings and emotions’.

He said he felt as if he were being pulled apart and reconstituted as part of the wider universe: ‘It was like basically becoming [the] fabric of the universe. And it was absolutely perfect. Like there was no fear and it was nothing. 

‘This was just the natural progression of what every single one of us is going to do, which is go back to the source, go back to this infinite consciousness or infinite complexity’.

But he also felt shocks of electricity passing through him, which he later realised came from paramedics using a defibrillator on his unconscious body. 

Adam said: ‘At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening. But in hindsight, it was me being defibrillated. I was defibrillated twice. I was in a ventricle fibrillation arrhythmia, which is basically the heart spasming’.

He said upon his arousal from an eight-hour coma: ‘If someone had told me it had been five years or a decade, I would have been completely on point with that’. 

Adam added that he was hyper-aware of his senses after leaving the hospital. 

Over time, he began to believe that human life is only one stage of true consciousness: ‘This is just the stage, it’s simply an evolution of consciousness. 

‘This is simply transient, where we exist right now, and there wasn’t any anthropomorphic figures or people in robes, it was just going back to the source of everything which is the infinite consciousness that permeates everything’.

The woman who died twice – and lived to tell the tale

Deborah Prum (pictured) revealed she nearly died twice

She said her second near-death experience saw her get ‘dropped in a vat of yellow pudding’

Deborah Prum is in the lucky, or perhaps unlucky, position of being one of the few people who can say they’ve died twice and lived to tell the tale. 

Her first near-death experience came when she went into labour to give birth to her son four weeks before she was due. 

Deborah said: ‘All of a sudden, the essence of my being was in the corner of a room, looking down at everything’.

Thankfully, her out-of-body experience didn’t last long and her healthy boy came out fine, despite warnings from doctors that a premature birth may have affected him. 

But her second near-death experience came a decade later, when she and her husband were involved in a car crash. 

She said that immediately after the incident: ‘I’m in this yellow space. It’s like I’ve been dropped in a vat of yellow pudding, not in a bad way. I’m completely surrounded by this yellow glow.

‘But I did not feel an attachment to myself, and I felt this most profound peace and almost like a quiet joy – not like a happiness bouncy joy but I felt a peace and I felt more at home in that space than I’ve ever felt.

‘It felt timeless. I couldn’t tell you that I was there a minute, or a century. And at a certain stage, I began hearing something which was like my husband’s frantic voice.

‘He later told me that I was out for something like three or four minutes, and I felt so guilty about this but I did not want to come back. I mean, I didn’t know where I was but I didn’t want to come back.’

She claims that after she was brought back to the land of the living, she was helped out of the car wreck by a young man. 

But her husband said this did not happen. 

Deborah revealed she had since become more spiritual, and no longer fears death: ‘One of my biggest fears in life is that I’ll die alone or I’ll be abandoned or whatever, but this experience took the edge off this fear.

‘These days, I’m less religious but more spiritual…My near death experiences brought the finiteness of life into sharp focus. I rarely procrastinate because I am never completely convinced that I will be given the gift of another tomorrow’.